"Sarah Palin Says "Drill, Baby, Drill" Was Right"

From CBS News, an excerpt of a Palin twitter message:
"Extreme Greenies:see now why we push'drill,baby,drill'of known reserves&promising finds in safe onshore places like ANWR? Now do you get it?"

There seems to be some revisionism going on; fortunately, electronic databases can highlight dissemblement or (perhaps too convenient) forgetfulness. Ms. Palin is now claiming that here "drill, baby, drill" statement did not refer to offshore drilling. Here are some quotes that indicate that she did explicitly refer to offshore drilling. From Media Matters, a quote from Palin in Loveland, CO, October 20, 2008.

And whether Joe Biden approves it or not, we will develop clean coal technology and we will safely drill for the billions of barrels of oil that are warehoused underground, including our offshore sources. We will drill here and drill now. (Cheers, applause.) Drill, baby, drill. Drill, baby, drill.

Regarding an inability to remember, here is an item from Reuters:

Ixtoc's blowout caused the world's worst ever oil spill. More than 140 million gallons of crude poured into the Gulf of Mexico, eventually washing up on beaches in Texas, hundreds of miles away. That is roughly three times more than what has so far spewed into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

...

That disaster made plain what could go wrong in deepwater drilling. After all, it took Mexico's state oil company Pemex PEMX.UL 297 days and the drilling of two special relief wells -- the industry's slow moving but only certain fix for blowouts -- to intersect and cap the raging Ixtoc well, located in 150 feet of water.

But a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents related to the Ixtoc spill, as well as interviews with many experts, shows that regulators for years downplayed the possibility of a similar disaster occurring in the United States.

"I remember people saying 'this would never happen if an American company was operating,'" said John Farrington, a retired researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who was part of a U.S. government-funded research cruise around the Ixtoc slick in September 1979. "There was a lot of wishful thinking going on."

In fact, a combination of politics, money and hubris encouraged the industry to drill ever deeper. Warnings from researchers in the aftermath of Ixtoc that little was known about how crude spilled deep under water might behave or that runaway deepwater wells could be more challenging to cap fell on deaf ears.

It seems to me that we need to heed Jim's point about the dangers of groupthink, technology-based over-optimism, and agency problems (managers taking risks exceeding that desired by shareholders) as well as externality issues [1] [2]. And to remember the past.

Related

How can you make money by investing in the stock market? It helps to go where the money is flowing. Along those lines, two of the strongest sectors of the current U.S. economy barely existed a few years ago.
In fact, one sector was left for dead (and I mean roadkill!) when the U.S. government effectively shut it down overnight in 2010. The other sector was rooted in then-novel technology that few people understood, and in which only visionaries saw the future.

Texaco Inc. geologist Robert Ryan didn’t suspect he was helping change the energy future of the Gulf of Mexico when he gave the go-ahead for a well that would break the world record for deep-water drilling.

The deep-water Gulf of Mexico, shut down after BP Plc’s record oil spill in 2010, has rebounded to become the fastest growing offshore market in the world.
The number of rigs operating in waters deeper than 1,000 feet (300 meters) in the U.S. Gulf will grow to 60 by the end of 2015, said Brian Uhlmer, an analyst at Global Hunter Securities LLC in Houston. As of last week, there were 36 rigs working in those waters, according to industry researcher IHS Petrodata.

(NEW ORLEANS) — Oil giant BP has agreed to pay a criminal penalty in the billions of dollars for the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a person familiar with the deal said Thursday. The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record about the deal, also said two BP PLC employees face manslaughter charges over the death of 11 people in the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that triggered the massive spill.

From Peter Coy and Stanley Reed in Bloomberg:
Should the heaviest portion of the spill come ashore, it may cause damage rivaling the 1989 wreck of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska's Prince William Sound, despoiling the breeding grounds of species in the fragile coastal-buffer zone that provides hurricane protection.

Bob van der Valk submits: Louisiana is currently bracing itself for the big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to hit their shores with devastating consequences. This calamity brings back the experiences and lessons learned from previous oil spill disasters like the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 and the 1969 Santa Barbara channel oil spill.